D-STAR is an open protocol developed by the Japanese government and by the J. A. R. L. Icom is currently the only company manufacturing D-STAR-compatible radios. D-STAR radios can talk directly to each other without any intermediate equipment, or through a repeater using D-STAR voice or data transceivers.

The D-STAR system supports two types of digital data streams: The Digital Voice (DV) stream used on 144 and 440 MHz which contains both digitized voice (3600 bps including error correction) and digital data (1200 bps). Using a DV radio is like having both a packet link and FM voice operating simultaneously.
The Digital Data (DD) stream, used only on 1.2 GHz, is entirely data with a bit rate of 128k bps. The data connection to a radio that uses DV is via an RS-232 interface or USB 1.0. An Ethernet connection is used for high-speed DD D-STAR data.

The Icom D-STAR repeaters and modules below are available to the customer only from Icom directly. They are shown here for informational purposes only.